The Free Market 6, no. 2 (February 1988) Compared with life in Western countries, where the socialist sector is sizable, life under total socialism is miserable. The standard of living is so deplorable that, in 1961, the socialist East German government built a system of walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, minefields, automatic shooting
Socialism and capitalism offer radically different solutions to the problem posed by scarcity: everybody can’t have everything they want when they want it, so how can we effectively decide who will own and control the resources we have? The chosen solution has profound implications. It can mean the difference between prosperity and impoverishment,
[This talk was delivered 23 November at the Palais Coburg in Vienna, Austria, at an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the publication of Mises’s Human Action.] Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for people as young as 20 or 30 to feel they have to share their memories with the world. Even at an advanced age, I prefer not to talk publicly about
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.